This infographic from Maritz Motivation Solutions shows the impact of gamification on traditional loyalty, incentive, and employee recognition programs.

[scroll down to see the complete infographic]

Two of the more amazing stats:

• Time on site jumped 250% after gamification.  That’s a huge increase in participation with your brand. And every minute they’re engaged with you is a minute their ignoring your competition’s seductions.
• Program emails open rates leapt 42% among the pilot test group compared to the control group.  That means gamification helps email cut through the clutter.  Probably because the gamified people were more engaged with the brand.

Gamification may be the simplest strategy for engagement.  Here’s a formula:

1. Know your players.  You might call them users, participants, people, employees, sales reps, but you should think of them as players and treat them as such. Get to know their playing styles, and make your business fun for them.

2. Know your business.  The game you build and the field you supply need to lead to your company’s success.  Once you know how the players want to play, you can align your business to their goals.

3.  Know your players’ goals.  Players are serious in their pursuit of an epic win.  Make sure your players know that the challenges and missions you’ve laid out lead them to victory—if they achieve all the little steps in between.

4. Let them cheat.  Players love cheats.  Don’t let them capture the epic win without playing the game.  That’s not even fun.  Instead, let them make their own rules and create their own challenges as the work toward capturing the flag.

5.  Make it social.  People are social creatures.  They have a need to bond. They also need to compete to make the game interesting.  Make sure the players have someone to play against and someone to conspire with.

6.  Cultivate the game.  Don’t assume you can lay out the playing field and let the game run forever. Interest will fade if you don’t keep it fresh.  The good news is that watching how your players play will lead you to new ideas to keep them engaged.

Remember, these “games” are not really games—they’re meta layers on top of core business models.

Now a question: could you take a bite of a problem with gamification?

Retailomania blog posted a presentation that predicts major upheaval in retail over the next decade. Just as many great old financial names disappeared in 2008, Magnus Ohlsson, founder of MORM, predicts many venerable retail names are about to go the way of Abercrombie and Fitch . . . before it came back as a used clothing store for kids.

Here are three critical points that apply to every business in every sector;

1.  You don’t know who you competitors are.  That’s because consumer behavior is replacing entire sectors.  Newspapers and magazines have lost their relevance and their clout.  Big box technology stores are disappearing. Email is where information goes to die. One-third of homes have eliminated their land line phones. Workers us Yammer to collaborate, which is why no one shows up at your meetings.

2.  Size is no longer an advantage.  Sure, size can sustain operations and give you a lot of places to cut, but it won’t build your future. As switching costs drop or go away, companies and people can afford to try tiny apps instead of massive systems.  They can always go back.  Security and quality mean “easily repaired or replaced,” not “never has a problem.”

3. Online and Social changes the consumer decision process. And there have never been so many channels of communication. Whether you’re customer is a shopper in a store, the CIO of General Motors, or the procurement group of a mid-size company, their decision processes are affected by  Facebook, Twitter, texts, and Yelp. People expect important, relevant information to meet them in their context, not yours.  If you make them come to your site or find your email, you might as well kiss them goodbye.

As recently as 2008, I told consumer loyalty clients that their competitors are not just the companies in their line, but Harry Potter and American Idol. That’s still true (if you update the references to The Avengers and Mad Men), but now people live differently.  We expect everything important to come to our smart phones at precisely the right time and in the format we demand.

That’s asking a lot of large companies, which is why tiny start-ups pose threats never before imagined.

In short, your competition is not the other companies you go head to head with. Just as a golfer’s real opponents are the course and himself, your real competitors are the way you’re used to doing things and the the things you’re used to doing.

Now, learn what keeps people loyal to a brand.

Then think about all the time your iPhone was exposed to moisture: jogging, that day you got caught in the rain, the time you set it down in a ring of condensation.  Then you’ll think about the times you’ve dropped, sat on it, and kicked it.

Then relax. Chances are, your iPhone simply decided to reset itself.

This happened to me the night before the most important business trip of my life.  I was about to spend 6 days in California with no means of communication–except for my laptop and Google phone.  Plus, I was coordinating activities of 4 other consultants.

I woke up soaking wet with fear at 3:30 a.m.  I decided to play around on the internet and searched for symptoms like mine–the phone shuts off and pressing the top silver button or the round awake/sleep button does nothing.

What I found was a MacRumors forum discussion with a simple solution:  Press and hold both buttons (top silver, bottom round) until the little Apple logo appears. For me it was about 10 seconds.  (You’ll lose hope after 5, but keep holding.)

You might want to bookmark this post in case this ever happens to you.

I’ve written before, sitting kills.  Upper back pain and fear of early death after a sickly, painful life are why I built a simple stand-up desk topper for my desk at work.

Now, more reports confirm that sitting shortens your life and damages your health while you are alive, while more standing can protect you from disease, keep you thin, and make you more resilient and energetic.

Every hour you sit watching television cuts 22 minutes off your life.  Gretchen Reynolds reports in NYTimes.com:

If an average man watched no TV in his adult life, the authors concluded, his life span might be 1.8 years longer, and a TV-less woman might live for a year and half longer than otherwise.

If you don’t want to wait until you should be dead to reap the benefits of sitting less, then consider this.  The likeliest reason your friend Janet can eat anything and stay thin, while you gain three pounds driving past a Krispie Kream is because Janet sits less than you do.

That’s because the negative effect of sitting begins the moment you assume the position.  In other words, when it comes to sitting, you don’t have to wait to start getting fat, getting sick, and dying young.

Here’s what happens the moment you sit down:

• Muscle electrical responses stop completely throughout your legs and and buttocks
• You calorie burn rate plunges to about 1 calorie per minute
• Insulin effectiveness plunges, which triggers your body to store everything  as fat
• Risk of obesity and Type II diabetes rise
• HDL (good) cholesterol falls and LDL (deadly) cholesterol climbs

All without any change in exercise or diet.

Business Insider has a great summary of the latest research since I last wrote about my experiment last September.  I made my stand-up desk for about $30 with materials from a single aisle at Home Depot.  But if you want to go even cheaper, check this out.

No one, not even the IRS, knows what’s in it.

[continued below the image]

The Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, cannot do his own taxes—and he’s the cabinet secretary who “owns” the tax code.

Every year, well-meaning IRS employees give taxpayers incorrect advice and instructions because of complexity.

On a personal note, even though I use TurboTax and have a relatively simple tax situation, I have made at least one mistake on four of my last six tax filings.

Is it any wonder that our economy’s fingernails scrape vainly along the smooth surface of the 21st century? Is it any wonder that companies like GE pay no taxes on billions in profits, while families with modest incomes struggle to get by?

Complexity may not be inherently evil, but it can cause inherently evil outcomes. But what could fix it?

How about this: a tax code everyone can understand. A tax code that ensures everyone with reasonable income pays something.  And a tax code that doesn’t punish married or single people. 

There are several flavors of this flat tax idea, but I like mine best.  I got it from Jack Kemp back in the 1980s.  Here it is:

Line 1: How much did you make?:  ____________

Line 2: Subtract 20,000 from Line 1: ____________

Line 3: Multiply Line 1 by .15:    ______________

Line 3 is your tax. Send it in.

There’s only one filing status: person. There’s only one exemption: your first $20k.  There’s only one tax rate: 15 percent.

Maybe the rate needs to be 18 or 12—depends on who you ask.

But this simple formula, for people and businesses, would  make taxes fairer, more understandable, and simpler.  The super rich could not avoid taxes, and a fifth grader could understand them.

Have a better idea?

Salesforce.com, SAP, Cisco, and many other companies (big and small) are using gamification and game science to increase engagement among distributors, sales forces, customers, and employees.

Gamification is simply designing systems, programs, and products with a game designer’s eye.  It’s about putting the user first, satisfying the same drives and emotions that keep people playing Angry Birds, Draw Something, or World of Warcraft. And it makes non-games more fun.

In other words, it’s great design. And this white paper tells the story.

I have been lucky to work with leaders in the field, like Rajat Paharia, founder of Bunchball, Natron Baxter, and Barry Kirk, a leader in the introduction of game science to the motivation, incentive, employee engagement, and consumer loyalty worlds.

Nicki Powers, a pioneer in the emerging field of engagement design, drove the development of this white paper, along with Barry Kirk.  I fed them a quote or something, but they were kind enough to put my name on the cover.

Please download the white paper and pass around the link.  Get your company on board with gamification.  It makes work fun.

When the timer rings, I’ll stop working. I’ll take a five-minute break to compete one 30-minute work cycle. Then I’ll start the timer over at 25.

If this post is complete and edited in the first 30-minute cycle, I’ll start a new task. If not, I’ll continue work on this post until it’s complete.

It’s all part of a remarkable productivity technique called The Pomodoro Technique.

The greatest difference between this productivity technique—describe almost in its entirety in two short paragraphs above—and all other techniques is work. The Pomodoro Method focuses on working, not on planning, organizing, or theorizing.

A little background

I “discovered” David Allen’s Getting Things Done method in about 2002. It was brand new, and it truly changed the way I planned.  It didn’t really change the way I worked, except to add quite a bit of organizing to my routine.

In 2008, I discovered Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits. Leo extended David Allen’s methodology and brought it much closer to actual work. But not close enough. The biggest lessons I learned from Leo were minimalism and habit change. Both useful, but they don’t get everything done more efficiently. Instead, Babauta taught me how to do less unimportant stuff, leaving more time and energy for the stuff that matters. (I still read Zen Habits every week, and I strongly recommend Leo’s book, The Power of Less.)

A couple of weeks ago, I found the Pomodoro Technique on Lifehacker’s 5 Best Productivity Methods survey. Lifehacker said:

The Pomodoro Technique was created by Francesco Cirillo back in the early 90s as a way to harness the power of focused work and frequent breaks to be more productive.

I visited the Pomodoro Technique website, downloaded four files—the guide, the cheat sheet, an inventory log, and a daily to do list. After reading the simple, one-page cheat sheet, I dug in. 

After just three days, the results were astonishing.  Two weeks later, I’m true believer. The Pomodoro Technique helps you get more work done faster with fewer interruptions and very little time spent planning and organizing.

When I started using the technique, I was overwhelmed with too many big projects and too little time.Within three days of the Pomodoro Method, one of the projects was on the shelf.  This gave me confidence that I could compete the other projects on time as well.

And I did.

In one week, I became proficient at the Pomodoro Technique, and I’ve spent exactly zero dollars doing it.  There is no mindset to adopt, no Zen to master. You don’t have to throw away the photos of your son on his third birthday just to process your inbox. 

With the Pomodoro Technique, you work for 25 minutes on a single task, then take a five minute break, then start another cycle, or Pomodoro.  After three or four Pomodoros, you take a 25 minute break. That’s about it. It couldn’t be simpler.

Best of all, as I said before, the Pomodoro Technique is about actual work, not planning. It gets stuff done, period.

My goal seemed simple.  Everything I read told me so.

Plus, I’ve been IT for most of my adult life, as both a systems guy and programmer.

How hard could it possibly be to move a WordPress blog from a private hoster to WordPress.com?

Turns out, it’s not hard at all unless something goes wrong.

Quick Outline

I was importing my archives into WordPress.com according to the directions.  I divided the whole thing into 8 smaller files to minimize risk of failure.

The first 5 file loaded fine.  The sixth one failed.

I got an email telling me to open a support ticket, and someone would fix the problem within 24 hours.

That was eight days and about five support tickets ago.  No one from WordPress.com has contacted me. Just  auto-reply emails saying “we got your message.”

I Tried

Here are my support tickets.  Let me know if you think I deserve to be ignored.  (I’ve already paid them $12, btw.)

Date: March 3, 2012
From: bill@billhennessy.net
To:  XXXXXXX@wordpress.com
Subject:  Import Failed: Second Request

Import failed.  Import shows import still running, but I received an email more than 24 hours ago that the import failed.

Date: March 4, 2012
From: bill@billhennessy.net
To:  XXXXXXX@wordpress.com
Subject:  Hello? Anyone there?

I received an email on Friday, March 2, that my import failed for unknown reasons. I cannot try again, because the WordPress import screen in the admin tool still says there’s an import in progress and that I should contact support if I haven’t heard anything in 24 hours.

It’s been about 48 hours now.  I was hoping to get the site moved this weekend.  Could you, at least, let me know when the error might be cleared so I can continue moving data to the site?

Thanks.

Date: March 5, 2012
From: bill@billhennessy.net
To:  XXXXXXX@wordpress.com

Subject:   What I Really Want to Know

Did I do something wrong?

I just want to move my blog from a self-hosted site to WordPress.com. I’m tired of managing everything myself and paying a lot every month for hosting.

Last Friday, the import process failed. I’m importing files exported from my self-hosted WordPress site.

You sent me an email and asked me to open a ticket.  I did.

You said you’d be in touch.  You weren’t.

It’s been 72 hours, and still no word.

I really, really want to move my blog to your system.  But I’m getting apprehensive.

I see in the forums that a lot of people have trouble getting your attention. And they get a lot of bad advice.  And problems take FOREVER to get resolved.

Is there something I did wrong, besides trying to move my blog to your system?  Is there something I could do to get your attention?

On the other hand, thank you.  You’ve given me a great topic to blog about on my loyalty marketing and brand building blog.

Date: March 6, 2012
From: bill@billhennessy.net
To:  XXXXXXX@wordpress.com
Subject: 96 Hours and Counting

We meet again.

Well, I meet.  Not sure what you do.

Opening a new ticket has become a daily routine.  A new ticket for the same problem: import failed.

My question now is this: do you actively ignore these tickets?  I mean, do you open them and chuckle at the problems people experience with your service?  Or is it passive, with three guys in Kool-Aid stained t-shirts playing Angry Birds on their iPads as the tickets stack up?

Anyway, write when you get a chance. I’ll be here.

Love,

Bill

Date: March 8, 2012
From: bill@billhennessy.net
To:  XXXXXXX@wordpress.com
Subject: Sorry I Missed Our Date

It’s me again.

I hope you weren’t too worried that I didn’t write yesterday. I’m sorry. The whole day was just a mess. Got called into meetings I didn’t know about–long meetings. By the time I got home, my mind was somewhere else.

Anyway, you’ll be happy to know that I still can’t finish importing my blog. But I’m sure you knew that. You’re the one who’s ignored these tickets for a week.

That’s pretty good. You’ve gone a whole week without so much as telling me what might be going on.

When I quit smoking, getting to Day Seven was a Very. Big. Deal. I guess it’s almost as great to go seven days without addressing a problem that prevents a customer from using your service.

Not to sound like know-it-all, but you might want to stop taking on new customers and new accounts until you figure out to service the ones you already have.

Well, I have to get some sleep now. I’m sure that’s never a problem for you, though. I’ll write again tomorrow, I’m sure.

Yours,
Bill

That Did It!

Finally I got response after posting my March 8 ticket to the public forums for everyone to read.

WordPress.com posted a very polite and understanding reply and let me know they’d fixed the problem.

At least I got some good blog fodder out of it.

Jennifer Pahlka is a remarkable woman.

She realized what many have realized: government often fails at its most basic tasks.

Governments don’t keep up with technology or culture. Nor can they act nimbly. A start-up produces finished products worth millions in four months; it takes government that long to start the first feasibility study.

Spotting government’s shortcomings isn’t what makes Jennifer so amazing. Every sane American knows that government is a nightmare of bureaucratic hell that admires problems and punishes the successful. Complaining about government is as common as complaining about the weather . . . and about as effective.  

Jennifer Pahlka is special because she launched and manages an organization that does what government should do, but can’t. In other words, Jennifer makes life better and government cheaper.

The organization she founded is Code for America. Here’s what they do:

Cities are under greater pressure than ever, struggling with budget cuts and outdated technology. Code for America believes that instead of cutting services or raising taxes, cities can leverage the power of the web to become more efficient, transparent, and participatory. And we want to help them do it.

I love this.Jennifer is making government work better for less money.

Please watch her inspiring TED talk. See if you’re not impressed with her vision and with Code for America’s mission.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Key quote: “A neighbor is a far better and cheaper alternative to government services.”

Here’s Jen’s blog.